File attachment improvements and bug fixes

We have just released some nice enhancements to the file attachment feature enjoyed by our Pro Plus Subscribers.

1) When viewing the Files page in the Organize section, you can now see how many tasks are associated with each file.
2) From this File Organization page, you can click a link adjacent to each file to quickly find any task that has that attachment.
3) From the Advanced Search page in the task section, you can now make a search that looks for tasks that have or dont have a file attachment

We have also fixed a few general bugs:
1) Quicksearch will now find the & and < characters correctly
2) If you have more than 6 collaborators, you can now reassign a task to the last person in the list without the popup disappearing before you are done.
3) The advanced search page could sometimes get confused about what you were looking at the last time you were there, and display all of your tasks by accident (which could cause the browser to get slow if you have thousands of tasks). This is fixed.
4) In the Notebook section, typing ? will bring up a list of the available keyboard shortcuts.
5) In the Notebook section, if you did a search with dividers closed and then opened the dividers, sometimes it didn't show the matching note. This is fixed.
6) When collaborators had not given you permission to view their "no folder" pseudo folder, it was still displayed on the left side of the page even though clicking on it did nothing. It is now not displayed.
7) The "Hide future tasks" filter was never applied on the calendar view, because it doesnt make sense in that context. Instead of showing a useless checkbox, we now hide it.

Thank God, at least one of these enhancements, #4, doesn't work. I tried typing "?" in a notebook note, and it just put in a ?, no list of shortcuts. This is a bad idea, since I often put questions in my notes, and want to be able to continue to do so! When you fix it, can you find a better way to see shortcuts, like "Ctrl?" or "Win?"?

I found several files on the list that has no files atached (0) but link returns one or more tasks on the other hand i found some cases with atached files where links doesn't return any related tasks. Is this normal or you need to fix it?

Hi Jake, Michael Linenberger here.
Just a quick reminder of a previous feature change request I submitted some time ago for your file attachments feature. Right now, as you note at the bottom of the File section, if you add a file that has the same name as an existing one it just overwrites the old file without warning. This is especially an issue when converting emails to tasks and the emails have attachments. One example why: It's common in voice mail systems to send a recording of the voice mail as an attachment in an email, and these systems often use the same filename each time. If you convert these to tasks for later action, the new converted tasks wipe out the files in all the other converted tasks making the attached recording useless. Lot's of other examples. A simple solution would be a feature that, say, appends a 1, 2, 3 etc to duplicate file names before saving. And that could be a configurable feature in case some uses really want to overwrite old files. Sucks to lose files without realizing it! Thanks for considering this fix again,
Michael

I just subscribed to the Pro and Plus of ToodleDo with a very high expectiation of attachment management with task. But to my disappointment, when you click on the icon for attachment, it cannot be previewable, you need to download the whole file in you application in order to see the contents of the file. That really slow down your task management. I am also using the iPhone and iPad versions which cannot integrated with attachment at all. It seems not much better than just linked your file with those free cloud storage apps, like Dropbox or Google Doc.

It is essentially the same as Dropbox. It would be a tremendous effort to allow documents to be previewed without downloading them, and it would only support certain document types. It's on our to-do list.

Except that with Dropbox you can:
1. Update files automatically, instead of having to manually upload any changes.
2. Automatically save multiple versions of a file.
3. Not worry about overwriting a file on the website.
4. Use subfolders.
5. Share files with other users.
6. Access files from an iOS or Android device.

Box.net has one key feature that I do not believe dropbox has and it is assignment of a unique http address to each file. This allows files to open instead of just going into dropbox. If anyone knows this to be incorrect about Dropbox please let us know.

I would like to also emphasize the importance of trying to prevent over-riding files with the same name. Much of what I find useful is that I can email tasks with attachments from my phone. However, I usually do not have control over the filename, particularly if it is a photo-- and these are all named the same by the software on the phone and then will over-write the prior imported attachment.